Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
For half a century the making of foreign policy has been studied in Western democratic countries as a field of specialization separate from the making of public policy in general. This intellectual differentiation rests upon implicit and explicit assumptions about the way the foreign policy field differs from other areas of public policy. The leading assumption is that foreign policy is “more important” than other policy areas because it concerns national interests, rather than special interests, and more fundamental values. A second assumption builds upon the first: since foreign policy questions evoke a different political response, it is assumed that political institutions function differently when they confront foreign policy issues. In addition, of course, different institutions are also involved, in that some governmental agencies are concerned exclusively or substantially with foreign policy. There is growing uncertainty among political scientists, in the United States at least, as to the validity of these assumptions. There is also considerable skepticism concerning the theoretical value of treating foreign policy processes as analytically distinctive—a skepticism that will undoubtedly draw all the different public policy research fields closer together in the future. Nevertheless, the present state of our knowledge reflects, for better or worse, a set of beliefs about the uniqueness of foreign policy processes within the political order.
This orientation toward foreign policy making can be traced to World War I and the events leading up to it—although it might have developed in the United States in any case, since these were America’s first years of great-power status and a period in which increasing attention was given to foreign relations. In the United States the war experience convinced some people that isolationism was no longer an appropriate response to international problems and that the United States must remain actively involved in the affairs of the world. Foreign policy became, for these people, the most important area of public policy, and responsible international participation the only viable political stance. And in both England and the United States the war gave rise to movements to end the traditional secretive practices of the world’s statesmen and diplomats, movements that found concrete expression in Wilson’s plea for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” and in the conference diplomacy of the League of Nations. Points One and Fourteen, and Wilsonian philosophy generally, were major building blocks in the progressive “democratization” of foreign policy.
Logically, this struggle for greater public participation in, and control over, foreign relations could have resulted in the assimilation of foreign policy to the working principles and practices of everyday politics in democratic countries. That it has not may be attributed to the prior claim for the “primacy of foreign policy,” to the ineluctable requirements of secrecy imposed by the demands of national political and military strategies, and to the small amount of interest in foreign policy on the part of the general public.
Nevertheless, the study of foreign policy making was permanently affected by the liberal, rationalist, democratic ideology, with its twin convictions that the people, once they were educated, would make liberal and wise decisions in foreign policy and that man could improve his political institutions and their policy outputs if he would only think about them intelligently. These convictions explain the focus of attention, down to the present day, on the search for “better” ways to handle foreign policy, both organizationally and politically, so that public values and common sense might be more freely admitted into policy-making circles, and “better” policies (that is, responsible international participation) might eventuate.
The bulk of scholarly enterprise in the field of foreign policy making lies along one or the other of these two lines of concern, which I shall summarize here as “rationality” and “ideology.” By “rationality” I mean a concern for the organization and structure of policy making which generally (but by no means exclusively) reflects a belief that certain policy-making relationships or arrangements can be found that are for one reason or another more “rational” than any others—that is to say, better designed to implement the values and decisions of intelligent and responsible foreign policy makers. By “ideology” I mean a concern for democratic control of foreign policy making which generally (although, again, not exclusively) reflects a belief that foreign policy decisions should be made by politically responsive or responsible individuals or groups and that the foreign policy of a democratic society can be wise and strong only to the extent that it commands the understanding and support of the public. Cutting across these two major approaches to the subject of foreign policy making are three different levels of analysis: the individual, the institutional, and the systemic. There are thus six major classifications, or clusters, into which the political scientist’s study of foreign policy making may be conveniently divided for explanatory purposes. We shall look at each of these in turn, largely in the American context, since by its intellectual antecedents and history this subject has been of interest predominantly to American scholars. Having done this, we will be in a better position to identify and discuss research on foreign policy making in other countries and research through cross-national comparisons.
The rational approaches
Rational-institutional approach . The central focus of the study of foreign policy making has long been on the institutions of government that are chiefly responsible for the formulation and administration of foreign policy. And in the present period, as in the past, the motivating force seems to be the uncovering of more efficient, effective ways of organizing the policy-making machinery so that it rationally serves the interests or purposes of the analyst, whether these purposes are economy, speed of decision, singularity of authority, or coherence in execution. The executive departments and agencies—the Executive Office of the President, the Department of State, the Foreign Service, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Information Agency, the Peace Corps—have been studied and, in many cases, restudied from different perspectives in the various historical periods that mark America’s development as a major power in world affairs. And certain of the functions of these institutions have come in for some scrutiny—diplomacy, for one, because the work of the diplomat is involved in so many of the processes of foreign policy making and execution, and intelligence, for another, because of the steady enlargement in the scope of covert political operations. Some examples of studies in this area are the works by Ransom (1958), Ilchman (1961), and McCamy (1964) on the executive side and Carroll (1958) on the congressional side.
In recent years, also, growing attention has been paid to the planning function in foreign affairs; this has been in response to the fear that without the assignment of adequate institutional responsibilities for thinking about the future, no one will have the time to give advance thought to emerging problems and to their avoidance or solution. (Current concern with foreign policy planning represents, perhaps better than anything else, the faith that political problems, like scientific or engineering problems, can be solved by the timely application of rational thought and organization.)
Because of the complexity of the institutional framework for making foreign policy and the frequency with which the institutions are altered either formally or through usage, the rational-institutional outlook has also focused on interagency coordination as a technique for rationalizing the continuously unwieldy processes of foreign policy formulation and agreement within the government. Actually, the phrase “administration of foreign affairs” refers as much to the coordination of powerful and nearly autonomous foreign policy agencies both at home and “in the field” as it does to the processes of policy making and execution within these agencies (Brookings Institution 1960). The development of high-level coordinating mechanisms like the National Security Council has drawn the interest of scholars, government officials, and members of Congress (see Hammond 1961) who have feared that the coordinating institutions may take over important policy-making functions.
Rational-individual approach . The development of the social sciences, especially of psychology, under the impetus of the political and social crises of World War II resulted in a new orientation toward the individual as the organizing point for political research. In opposition to what was felt to be the empty formalism of traditional institutional and administrative analyses, some students of foreign policy making shifted their focus to individuals and the ways in which they perceived the internal and external factors that came to bear on their institutional settings. The major products of this new line of inquiry have been decision-making studies (e.g., Snyder et al. 1962) that attempt to understand both the factors in human choice and the logic of administrative structure in the foreign policy field by examining the processes of individual and group decision making in institutional settings.
Recent developments in organization theory, although based on research in other types of institutions (e.g., Cyert & March 1963), have considerable relevance to the study of behavior in foreign policy agencies and should be an important influence on future research. The behavior of individuals when they occupy policy-making roles is central to the analysis of decision making, in game models as in the real world, and it explains the continuing interest in biographies and memoirs of policy officials. Students of foreign policy look to political biography, both conventional and psychoanalytic (see George & George 1956), for life experiences that help to illuminate the relations between individuals possessing particular personality types, backgrounds, and the like and the operating norms of particular policy-making offices.
Rational-systemic approach . At still another level, the search for more rational arrangements of organization and structure in the foreign policy field has led scholars to study the patterned interactions of individuals and institutions that constitute the universe of foreign policy making. These studies of interactions or systems cover dyadic relationships between political actors as well as more inclusive studies of how men and institutions handle problems or produce policies. And if the focus, on the individual level, is on reality as perceived by persons in policy-making roles, here the focus may be said to be on the objective reality created by the interactions of two or more political institutions.
The interactions of individuals and institutions involve accommodations of power and interest that we customarily associate with politics rather than administration. This is the case whether the individuals or institutions stand in some hierarchical relationship to one another or are relatively autonomous, deriving their power independently from other sources. Yet much of the scholarly work at the systemic level overlooks these sources of conflicts of power and interest, approaching the subject instead as if there were some arrangements of the foreign-policy-making institutions of government that were rationally or optimally designed to achieve a superior kind of foreign policy. Some commonly studied partial systems of foreign policy making, described in the phrases “executive-legislative relations” and “bipartisanship,” are often treated in this way. The three-cornered relationship of the president, his party in Congress, and the opposition party in Congress has often been examined (e.g., Woodrow Wilson Foundation 1952) to see if a way could be discovered to remove the friction in the system that is presumed to interfere with the smooth functioning of a unified, national-interest-oriented policy machinery. [See BIPARTISANSHIP.]
Recent scholarship, however, has begun to change this emphasis on the structural aspects of foreign policy interactions. Instead of attempting to eliminate or bypass the political features of foreign-policy-making systems by emphasizing administrative arrangements, contemporary scholars have been concentrating precisely on these features (Huntington 1961; Robinson 1962; Schilling et al. 1962). They have begun to study the interactions of individuals within and between foreign policy agencies as sets of bargaining relationships, which are similar to the bargaining processes that take place in other areas of public and political life where competitions of power and of interest are more overt and accepted. This bargaining orientation is thus less committed to the “rational” aspect of foreign policy making; its normative implications tend rather to be those of science in general—that is, one needs to understand how a system operates before one can calculate the consequences of attempting to make any given change in it.
Another body of literature that might appropriately be described in this category consists of “case studies” that reconstruct the way specific issues, policies, or events were handled by the governmental participants in the foreign-policy-making process. These are more likely to be historical-descriptive (e.g., Jones 1955) than analytical in nature, and they find their rationale in the assumption that the mysteries of the governmental process will yield to the accumulated weight of information on how the system has actually worked in specific instances in the past.
The ideological approaches
The second major approach to the study of foreign policy making I have called “ideological,” because in one form or another it is concerned with the democratization of foreign policy—with the possibilities and procedures for introducing a substantial measure of public values into every stage in the formulation of foreign policy. This approach starts from the general premise that the foreign policy area has different roots and different requirements of interest and support in the political system than do other policy areas. It then branches out in two directions. One line of inquiry, based explicitly on the primacy of the foreign policy area over other policy areas, seeks to alter the bases of interest and support in order to optimize public knowledge of, participation in, and control over, foreign policy decision making. A second line of inquiry seeks to discover what the different roots and requirements of interest and support are, in order to understand the operative political processes, sometimes for the purpose of facilitating democratic control and sometimes for more general social science purposes. In both of these lines of inquiry, the central objects of study are most often either nongovernmental groups or the interactions between the nongovernmental and the official elements.
Ideological—institutional approach . Just as the foreign policy institutions of government have been the central focus of study for those seeking better modes of organizing the foreign policy machinery, so the institutions of nongovernmental foreign policy activity have come in for a large share of the attention of those interested in a greater democratic perspective for foreign policy. In this context, foreign policy has benefited from an inclination in political science generally to explore the group basis of politics; thus, the role of organized interest groups in foreign policy making has become an important area of study (Cohen 1959). Much of this research has been limited to the positions, interests, and demands of particular organizations, and thus it has shared in the empty formalism of some of the rational-institutional studies. But increasingly, interest-group activities are being examined at the points where they intersect the domains of other participants in the process of foreign policy making: that is, they are more and more being treated as parts of a political system. And attention is also being turned to skill groups of a comparatively unorganized nature, such as scientists and “academic strategists,” which are playing a larger role in the technical complexities of foreign policy making in a nuclear environment (Gilpin & Wright 1964).
The widespread conviction that a sound and stable foreign policy requires an interested, informed, intelligent public opinion has led to extensive, although far from satisfactory, investigations of the major channels through which foreign policy attitudes and information are transmitted to public audiences. The role of the universities as factors in the development of interest in, and knowledge about, foreign affairs has been a subject of study for some years, although precise measures of the impact of educational institutions at all levels on the foreign policy thinking of students are still lacking. The media of mass communication have been intensively scrutinized for many years (see Hero 1959), although their impact on foreign policy attitudes and information is still largely a matter of intelligent speculation (guided by deep concern) rather than of demonstrable fact.
It was noted above that most of the ideologically oriented studies of foreign policy making were nongovernmental in nature. An important exception concerns the treatment of the U.S. Congress. Part of the study of Congress as a foreign-policy-making institution is approached from the point of view of clarifying its internal organization and procedures and of understanding its interactions as part of the governmental process; hence, it was discussed under the rational—institutional heading. But important parts of this study of Congress are approached from the point of view of understanding and improving its representative role in the foreign policy field, and so they merit inclusion here also. This ideological perspective on the Congress is concerned with that body as a major object of public representation on foreign policy matters and as a channel through which public preferences and aspirations are made a constituent ingredient of foreign policy (Dahl 1950).
Ideological-individual approach . One of the most important and durable approaches to the subject of popular participation in foreign policy making has been through public opinion studies—through sampling and aggregating the attitudes of ordinary citizens. These studies find their rationale in the belief that if foreign policy were to be formulated both democratically and wisely, the average man would have to be interested, well-informed, and enlightened. And in order to discover the conditions of public interest, information, and attitudes at any point in time, as well as possible changes in these conditions over time, it has been necessary to explore the many dimensions of public opinion on foreign policy. In fact, the phrase “public opinion and foreign policy” generally refers to the foreign policy outlook of ordinary citizens rather than of those groups or publics that might be politically more effective in presenting their views.
After thirty years of public opinion research, the data on public attitudes toward foreign policy questions have reached mountainous proportions and have formed the bases for many studies of the public opinion process, both in its political and its psychological dimensions (see especially Almond 1950; Scott & Withey 1958; Deutsch & Edinger 1959). Normatively, these data, which continually show the large majority of the population to be uninterested and uninformed on foreign policy, have been used to justify and guide governmental and private efforts to capture public attention and to enlighten the public on foreign policy matters.
A growing feeling that data drawn from samples of the general population have already yielded whatever significance they contain is leading to new directions in research on public opinion. Scholars are beginning to use opinion data more imaginatively, seeking to relate the foreign policy opinions of attentive and interested individuals to more formal steps in governmental foreign policy making. Similarly, students of public opinion are focusing their attention more narrowly on the leadership elements among nongovernmental groups—on those persons who, by virtue of their special positions or qualifications, have an especially powerful role in shaping the views and the policies of public groups. [See PUBLIC OPINION; see also Rosenau 1963.]
Ideological-systemic approach . Careful study of the processes of public participation and control in foreign policy making has led rather directly to the systemic level, since it has been readily observed that any effort to explore the influence of public factors on governmental decision makers almost automatically compels the investigator to study the patterns of interaction between public and governmental actors. The broadest studies of a systemic variety are, once again, case studies of the interactions of the governmental and the nongovernmental spheres as they have actually taken shape in a particular policy-making circumstance (e.g., Cohen 1957; Bauer et al. 1963) or as they may be traced out through a detailed analysis of how a single nongovernmental group or institution confronts the governmental process (Cohen 1963). Still lacking in this effort to understand how the public influences foreign policy making, however, are studies at the decision-making points to establish with some accuracy the constraints and opportunities that foreign policy officials read into the public mood: too often the subject is approached as if “the public” were always a source—if not the source—of constraints on wise governmental initiative and decision making in foreign policy.
A more circumscribed but still striking pattern of interactions that has been studied from the perspective of “who is to control” is the civil—military relationship. For many years the main concerns of these studies were the devices and techniques for maintaining civilian—hence, ultimately, public—control over military personnel and institutions, which were generally presumed to pose a threat to democratic government by their very existence, if not by their hidden aspirations to power. This simplistic viewpoint has given way in recent years to more complex approaches to the question of civil versus military contributions to public policy, since the military have perforce been accorded a larger role even while civilian authority has been substantially strengthened (Stein 1963).
Research needs
The persistent and increasingly imaginative exploitation of the approaches to the study of foreign policy making discussed above has taught us a great deal about the subject, but in a rather segmented way. This review points up how little there is in the way of explicit general models of the foreignpolicy-making process—or, more precisely, processes, since there is no single combination of forces that is always operative and no single path that is followed in every instance. While much necessary work remains to be done in each of the above classifications before we can lay claim to confident understanding of how the parts of the foreign-policy-making system operate, such work would be helped immeasurably by more elaborate theories governing the whole system of foreign policy making.
In addition to a dearth of general theories, and perhaps as a contributing factor to that dearth, there has been very little comparative analysis in the study of foreign policy making. Rather, our analyses of institutions, individuals, and even systems have been singular and for that reason not always cumulative. At the present time we cannot have very great confidence in the generality of our hypotheses and insights. Comparisons are possible between similar institutions or similar policy-making functions in different countries or different political settings, or with respect to the same institutions or functions operating in different historical periods. It is also possible to compare the behavior and interactions of participants across a representative range of policy issues arising in any one political system. Such comparative analyses seem to be a very promising means of formulating a generally applicable model of foreign policy making.
We noted at the beginning of this article that the subject of foreign policy making has been most extensively pursued in the United States. Much less work—and much less sophisticated work—has been done on foreign policy making elsewhere in the world. How does one account for this situation?
In the first place, the historical circumstances and the political setting that have inspired this research in the United States have not been present to any important extent in other countries. Even in Great Britain, where the movement for open diplomacy had some force during World War I, the stronger political traditions of executive discretion in foreign affairs have discouraged an open exploration of foreign policy making, especially where one could detect in that exploration some aspirations for greater public participation. In countries that did not undergo political experiences comparable to those of the United States, the political culture has directed the attention of scholars to other kinds of problems.
Second, interest in modern methods of social science research has developed more slowly elsewhere in the world than in the United States. Apart from public opinion research, which has had an extensive development, research on foreign policy making that has been done in other countries has usually been historical-descriptive in nature and can be characterized as rational—institutional. With few exceptions (e.g., Frankel 1963), the major works on foreign policy making in countries other than the United States have dealt with the formal administrative apparatus for the conduct of foreign relations.
Third, the lack of a tradition of comparative analysis in this field has meant that even American scholars have been slow to turn their attention to aspects of foreign policy making in other countries. Quality studies dealing with individual countries have only recently started to appear (e.g., Speier & Davison 1957; Bishop 1961; Mendel 1961); genuinely comparative studies have still to be made.
There is no reason to believe that our growing knowledge of foreign-policy-making processes in the United States will help us to understand what these processes are like in other countries: we have long since learned that propositions drawn from the American political system are of limited relevance to other political contexts. The comparative study of political systems is now expanding rapidly; the comparative study of foreign-policy-making processes could be made an important part of that endeavor.
BERNARD C. COHEN
[See alsoCIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS; INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS; MILITARY POLICY; NATIONAL INTEREST; NATIONAL SECURITY; PUBLIC POLICY; SCIENCE, article OnSCIENCE-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS.]
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